Amos N. Jones

Amos Jones teaches and writes in the areas of contracts, civil rights, religious freedom, and ethics. His work focuses on contemporary conflicts resulting from competing liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

After seven years of practice involving national-security regulation as well as employment and religious-liberty litigation, Professor Jones pursues a scholarly agenda critiquing legal remedies for various kinds of discrimination as derived from the fundamental law. He also evaluates the legal profession’s moderating function amid the clashing of groups’ interests. Recent publications include articles in the Widener Journal of Law, Economics & Race, the Georgia State University Law Review, and the North Carolina Law Review.

Professor Jones advocates publicly. In addition to contributing to an array of legal and popular publications and media programs, he has advised Republic of Georgia scholar-practitioners on liberty provisions of the constitution framed after that country’s Rose Revolution of 2003. He has been invited to present before leading law audiences on four continents, including at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky in the United States and Monash University (Australia), Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia/South America), and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany/Europe) abroad. In 2012, he delivered expert testimony during the Budget Oversight Hearings for the District of Columbia’s Office and Commission on Human Rights, critiquing enforcement practices before former mayor Marion Barry, Chair of the council’s Committee on Aging and Community Affairs. Professor Jones’s televised testimony informed the D.C. Attorney General’s bringing of charges in late 2013 against a Section 8 management company that had improperly barred a Bible study group from a Methodist-related seniors’ housing complex near the White House. In 2014, Professor Jones won a unanimous, 7-0 First Amendment case of first impression at the Kentucky Supreme Court, which had granted discretionary review in a racial discrimination/ministerial exception case highlighting tensions between enforcement of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment’s religious-freedom clauses. Other matters on which Professor Jones consults involve institutions and companies accused by particular groups of illegally discriminating based on age, gender, national origin, race, and/or religion.

Before coming to Campbell Law, Professor Jones practiced for three years in the international trade and commercial litigation groups of Bryan Cave LLP in Washington, D.C., where he developed unique expertise on the growing reach of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 and related counterespionage regulations. Prior to entering the legal profession, he was a journalist for Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers including The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, and The (Westchester County) Journal News. He played viola professionally with the Charlotte Philharmonic Orchestra in its 2000-01 season.

Professor Jones graduated with honors in Political Science from Emory University, where he studied on Robert W. Woodruff and National Merit scholarships and was named a 1999 Harry S. Truman Scholar and a member of USA Today’s year 2000 All-USA College Academic First Team, competitively ranked as one of the country’s top twenty students. He later earned the Master of Science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as an Executive Editor of both the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal and the Harvard Human Rights Journal. While at Harvard, he was awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, on which he spent his first year out of law school as a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Australia’s University of Melbourne. There, he studied the development of Bills of Rights in the Australian setting and served as a Resident Tutor in Baptist-affiliated Whitley College.

A Trustee of The First Baptist Church Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a former Resident Trustee of International House New York, Professor Jones served from 2012 to 2014 as Vice Chair of Campbell Law’s Faculty Recruitment Committee and in 2013-14 as Chair of the school’s Committee on Community, Diversity and Student Life.

Admitted in the District of Columbia and before the Supreme Court of the United States, Professor Jones joined the Campbell Law faculty in 2011.